


Once & For All

by lizandletdie



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Rumbelle Showdown 2015, round one eliminee
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-08
Updated: 2015-07-08
Packaged: 2018-04-08 08:36:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4297980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizandletdie/pseuds/lizandletdie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Belle meets her secret pen pal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once & For All

**Author's Note:**

> So this was a round one eliminee in the Rumbelle showdown this year and I just never bothered to repost it.
> 
> Prompts: Hospital, Once, Secret pen pals

It was supposed to just be a one-time thing. Belle’s eighth grade civics class had an extra credit assignment to send a letter to a wounded soldier thanking him or her for their service. Seeing as she’d just moved to the US from Australia, Belle had decided to take the opportunity to boost her grades for the term. Her soldier was a Colonel Gold who’d been injured in Iraq. The assignment was only to write to him once, but Belle had been surprised when he’d written her back. He thanked her for her time and wished her luck on adjusting to her new school, and he’d mentioned that he had immigrated himself ten years earlier. Belle couldn’t resist an introduction like that, after all. She didn’t know anyone who’d come to the US from abroad except for her and her parents so the idea of someone else who’d know what she was going through was too exciting to keep her from writing him back.

Neither one of them really thought much of the correspondence, particularly. He offered her some tips on conquering her homesickness and told him about his son and wife. Belle remembered being touched by his obvious affection for the little boy and wrote him back about her own parents. This back and forth went on for years. After a little while, those letters became the highlight of her day whenever she got one. He was there for her when her mother died, and she cried for him during his divorce. They never exchanged pictures (though she’d seen one of him before her first letter where he was standing next to an airplane in the desert somewhere and looking tan), but she told him things she’d never dared to tell anyone in her real life. He was like a diary that provided feedback.

When she started college, something changed. It was like now that she was an adult, he became more open with her. She learned about his military career. He’d been in Kosovo, and Sierra Leone and places she’d never seen. He never said it outright, but she suspected he’d been thankful when he was injured. He seemed tired of fighting, and sick of the military in general. He confided he’d joined up originally because his wife was pregnant and he needed a steady job fast. Being discharged let him go back to school for business management and they had been in college at the same time, which they’d both found comforting.

The first photo she ever sent him was the day she was applying for grad school. One of the schools was in Storybrooke, and since they’d been corresponding for a decade maybe it was time they met. Even after he’d agreed and given her the name of a diner they could meet at, it still didn’t feel like real life. Not until he called her the day before their arranged meeting, his Scottish accent blunted by years in America, that the reality of it all hit her square in the chest and she was forced to sit down as he asked after her flight and how her hotel was. He wasn’t her secret pen-pal anymore. He was a man – real and flesh and blood – and she was going to be meeting him in a matter of hours.

“Granny's” was precisely the sort of institution that had Belle looking at attending grad school in smaller towns. It was a diner in the front and a Bed & Breakfast in the back, and Belle was madly in love with everything about it from the old fashioned claw foot tub in her room to the leggy waitress with the painted red lips whose grandmother owned the place. Although her first look at Col. Gold threatened to remind her how very little she really knew about falling madly in love with anything, much less a town.

He’d been waiting as she walked into the diner and looking very little like the one photograph she’d seen of him ten years before. He was shorter than she’d imagined when he rose to offer her a handshake that she initially mistook for a hug, but seeing as she barely topped five feet herself that was scarcely a hardship. He was older, of course, than he had been – then again, so was she. There were a few more lines around his eyes than she remembered (but how much could she tell from a photo?) and there was a touch more grey in his hair. He was less tan, too, and clean shaven rather than the light beard he’d sported in Iraq.

And he was squirming uncomfortably, which he’d never done in her imagination and was also her first indication that perhaps she’d been staring at him a bit longer than really appropriate for a first meeting. She did that sometimes.

“So,” she said, tearing her eyes off of a man who half felt like an imaginary friend at this point. “Storybrooke seems nice.”

“Yes,” he replied eagerly, jumping on her topic. “It’s definitely got an appeal all its own. I actually own an antique shop just down the street from here.”

“I remember,” she said. “ _Mr. Gold’s_. Why did you name it that, anyway? You’re not a mister.”

He shrugged.

“Colonel Gold sounds like a character in Cluedo, and anyway it would invite too many questions. There are some things I don’t want to have to explain to everyone who walks in the building.”

She nodded, thinking of all the times he’d talked about not wanting his son to join the military like him. Neal was now a high school freshman and she knew Cameron was worried that the kid was still aching to be a soldier like his dad.

The conversation died out to an awkward silence after that, and Belle had never been so happy to get handed a tuna melt in her life as when the leggy waitress came back with their meal.

“Their sandwiches aren’t bad,” he said between fries. “But honestly the real time to come here is breakfast. The pancakes are delicious.”

“Well,” she replied. “You’ll just have to invite me to breakfast next time.”

He widened his eyes a touch, and she realized she’d asked him to meet her again. Well, why not? They’d known each other for a decade in some form and she may be living here soon enough. It would be nice to have a friend even if he knew all her deepest secrets from high school.

“How are you liking the town so far?” he said, changing the subject masterfully. “Everything you hoped?”

“It’s nice,” she said after a moment. “I liked the school already, and the program seems good. Hating the town wouldn’t have been a dealbreaker, but…I do like it.”

“Good,” he replied with a smile. “That’s good.”

Lunch turned into a tour of the town. For some reason it hadn’t occurred to her that he still would be on a cane after his injury (he’d stopped complaining about it years ago and it had sort of slipped her mind) but he still wanted to walk her around. The more she saw of the town, the more she fell in love. By the time he returned her safely to her room at Granny’s, she was more sure than ever that Storybrooke University would be her home for the next few years.

Their earlier awkwardness returned at the door.Neither one could quite decide if the day should end with a handshake, a hug, or a kiss on the cheek. Somehow, the ended up on all three. Or they would have, except both went in for the cheek kiss at the same time, resulting in a brushing of lips that had him jerking himself back like she had suddenly caught fire before stepping back into her space and kissing her again – properly this time. It wasn’t a hard kiss, more lips than tongue, but it was warm and soft and she found herself melting into his embrace in the hallway as her hands (of their own free will) toyed with the ends of his hair. She liked his hair longer, she decided. The buzzcut hadn’t suited him nearly as well. By the time he pulled away again, her mind was made up, she would apply to the program here.

She would mourn the loss of her imaginary friend, but perhaps the time had come to put away childish things once and for all – to surrender the security of him for a chance at more.


End file.
